Day 3, 4, & 5: The bathroom

I'm pretty sure this wasn't original to the house. I knew I wanted to rip this vanity out, even as I was walking through the house for the first time with my realtor. Yep, I knew this house was mine even then. The question of the hour concerned the tile and whether it would continue under the vanity. My realtor and I were betting it would, but you never know.

I loved the floor tile in this bathroom. The shower tile (which was not original)? Not so much. And the color scheme they chose in here was puzzling, like Easter threw up.


I disconnected all the plumbing and turned off the water at the wall. I removed the countertop first, separating it from the wall where I discovered they had used 1/4" of glue. I don't do this for a living, but this seemed like an excessive amount of adhesive. I curse whoever made this decision.


I couldn't see where they had screwed the vanity to the wall, so I just pulled for all I was worth. Many things I do, not with brains or brawn, but rather out of stubbornness. It turns out that vanity was indeed screwed to the wall, but I just pulled that mothereffer right out of the wall. My back realllly hurt that night. But I had won! Take that, ugly vanity!

The technical term for this is "icky."

My spidey sense had told me I needed to pull this vanity out, and I'm glad I listened. There was mold, lots of dirt, hair, and dust. It was a respiratory nightmare, so guess what I did? I PUT ON A MASK. Go me.


Some bleach and elbow grease later, and I had all the grime taken care of. The thick layer of adhesive? I spent four hours chipping that stuff off. I gouged the hell out of the wall, too.

My friend Maura told me, after the fact, that there's some sort of product you can get at the hardware store that will melt this stuff off. But where's the fun in that? It's not like I had anything else to do in the house. Ahem.


It's sort of fun to see the old layers, the paint choices made by people 50 years ago. People back then were COLORBLIND.


I bought a Kohler pedestal sink on craigslist for $40 and was so excited to install it. Once I started digging around on the Internet I found out they call it "the graduate school project of DIY." It turns out you need to open the wall and install a crossbeam into which you can bolt the top part of the sink. It's tricky and there's a chance that you can crack the sink if you have something a few millimeters off. I firmly believe I could do this, given some help and lots of time, but I didn't have a lot of time, and I had many other projects to do. So I decided to let the pedestal sink go and install a new vanity. Of course, the one I wanted wasn't in stock so I had to order it. I was still awaiting delivery when I moved into the house, which meant I got to brush my teeth in the kitchen sink for two weeks.

I spackled all the gouges and holes in the walls and primed the bathroom with a gallon of Kilz. Then I scrubbed the hell out of the bathtub and toilet. Future plans included painting the bathroom, recaulking the tub, and replacing the wax ring on the toilet. I'm ambitious. Or dumb. One of the two.

The new garage door

My closing came down to the wire and I actually ended up closing two days late because of a hold up with the appraisal. Apparently they didn't like my half of a garage door. I didn't either, but it didn't seem like something that should stop me from getting my house. After much back and forth with my lender it was decreed that I had to put $800 in escrow until I proved that I had installed a new garage door. Grrr.

I looked online and saw that garage doors can cost as little as $180. I did a little digging and found out that installing a garage door yourself is pretty hard. I guess those big springs they use can cause dismemberment! And let's face it, I don't know how to install one myself and no one I knew had ever done it before. So I called up my friendly garage door installer and asked for "the cheapest garage door humanly possible." So while I didn't want to spend money on that, it had to happen.

Look who's all growns up!

And you guys? Coming home from work to find a project completed, a project that didn't require you to lift a single finger, save to sign a check? That is HEAVEN ON A STICK. He even swept up after himself. And the installer was hot, to boot. EVERYONE WINS.

In the end I was so glad they made me do this. I think my neighbors appreciated it greatly, I now had somewhere to store things like the lawnmower (which had been sitting in the kitchen, which smelled terrific), and I didn't put it off forever like I know I would have otherwise. Everyone wins.

Day 1 & 2: The kitchen

It has a nice personality!

The nicest thing I could call the kitchen is "comically grimy." The cabinets, while still in good shape, likely hadn't been scrubbed in 20 years. There's no range hood, so I imagine any smoke just sort of sat in the kitchen. The cabinet doors were filthy and the hardware was from the 70's. And it was very ugly. I decided to remove all the doors and drawers, remove their hardware, and to give them a good scrub in TSP.


I numbered the doors so I'd know where they'd go later. This was another Good Idea.

Some of the hardware didn't want to come off, it was so caked with grime. After scrubbing and rinsing and drying the doors, I did the same inside the cabinets, removing the old contact paper.

Man, do I have feelings about contact paper.

I removed 70 years of contact paper from the cabinets, layer upon layer of it. The bottom layer took me about two days to remove and I had to blast it with a hair dryer first to warm up the adhesive, then carefully peel it off in small strips. I swear that I am still finding bits of the old paper stuck to things in the house. I've decided that contact paper with adhesive is the devil, in fact. I decided it's not allowed in the house . . . well, except in those six drawers . . . but that's it!

I then painted the insides of all the cabinets and hit the doors and drawers with a coat of Howard Feed-N-Wax wood preserver. It made them shiny and pretty again. I had a lot of people ask me about paintning my cabinets, but I'm reluctant to do that. Once you paint it's hard to undo without a lot of time, effort, or expense. And I like the look of real wood. With the new hardware some of the cabinets look really nice:


With some of the doors the old hardware created a stained depression in the wood which still shows:


Someday, down the line, I'd like to have the doors refinished. I think the burl of the wood is gorgeous and these cabinets are STURDY. Someday I'll have a professional hang the doors too, because, man, is that ever hard to do by yourself. All of my doors are crooked or they overlap a bit, or they aren't level . . . I never knew that would be such a challenge.

First projects in the house

Monday: Day 1 of house work week.


Buying a fixer I sort of bounced all over the place with where I wanted to start. For some reason I felt like I needed to get the basement finished out so I could offer it to potential roommates as a place to be creative, watch TV, or just get away from each other. Nevermind that the sink in the bathroom doesn't work, I have a finished basement! I'm not sure what I was thinking.

As a side note, waiting for my closing date was the most stressful thing I've been through in a while. I couldn't do anything at the house, so instead I stewed and worried. I slept horribly, crunching numbers in my head almost constantly. Could I really afford this place? How long would it take me to get a roommate? One Saturday night I tossed and turned, convinced that no one would ever want to live with me if I didn't have a dining room table and chairs. THE HORROR. But I went out the next day to Rerun on Fremont and got a really cool (if a little dilapidated) Danish dining set for $70.

Anyway, the basement. Scott, Z, and Keith volunteered to help me put in laminate flooring in the basement the following Saturday. Lumber Liquidators had a very good sale going, so I could outfit the whole basement for about $350, which seemed like so much money at the time. So my first project was the pull the mildewing carpet out of the basement. This is the part in the story where people always say, "You wore a mask/ventilator, right?"


Ummmm . . . . no? It didn't even occur to me at the time. In retrospect? BAD IDEA JEANS, you guys. But I did it and I haven't died yet. The carpet came up really easily, as did the padding underneath. I got it hauled up the stairs and into the garage and it wasn't even 10am yet. I was feeling so good, like I was going to have this whole house finished in the one week I had taken off of work.

I encountered another layer of padding in the basement, the glue-down kind. And I noticed this unfortunate little problem:


These are water stains from where the water table rose in my basement. Or at least that's what I thought it was. So I emailed Keith and told him what I suspected and waited for a response. In the meantime I had this epiphany: any potential roommate is not going to care about the basement, they are going to care about the kitchen and the bathroom. And furthermore, so would I. So I decided to shelve the flooring project and focus instead on getting the bathroom and kitchen fixed up.

Most days I'm not very smart, but this idea? It was a very good one.

Househunting and the reveal

My dad started harassing me last Christmas about trying to buy a house. The market had tanked, there was a tax credit available, and I would likely never be able to afford on my own otherwise. I kept telling him, "I need another year to save money!" and he kept telling me "now is the time."

When I started looking at houses I was a little shocked to see what was in my price range. We looked at houses with non-functioning kitchens and bathrooms. Houses that had been "remuddled" in the 70's and then left to irresponsible renters. Really cool houses (like the one with the "Screw room" placard pictured above, believe it or not) in terrible parts of town. Houses with floors that sloped and buckled. Houses where the walls of the basement were crumbling and bowing in. I always wanted to buy a fixer (much the way people want to buy puppies: with little thought to the actual work involved) but in order to stay in the area I wanted I was going to need to do more fixing than I had anticipated.

The only thing that was keeping me from panicking completely was the $8000 federal first-time home buyer credit. But when you start gutting bathrooms, $8000 doesn't go very far. I didn't even own a couch. How was I going to get a fixer in livable shape AND buy furniture? I started to have that panicky feeling again, so I decided to see if any of the makeover shows on HGTV were filming in Portland. It just so happened that My First Place was casting and their application was blessedly brief.

I should stress that I had no interest in being on TV. I imagine it's like hearing yourself on an answering machine. "Oh god, do I really sound like that?" But add in cameras that make you look heavier than you are and that broadcast your bad hair day to lots of people you don't know. It just doesn't appeal to me.

But I did it for the housewarming gift, which in this case was living room furniture.

Because I am high-strung and rather Type-A, I wasn't content to let the designer assigned to me do her job. I had ideas and a lot of fears that she would give me something awful. Since I was going through the mortification of being on reality TV for this furniture, I couldn't just sit idly by. Ultimately she allowed me to make a wish list of furniture for the room, but she wouldn't tell me what had been selected. The couch is by Dania and I found it on craigslist. The two side chairs are from the 1950's and they came from Shag on Sandy Blvd. The coffee table is from Vintage Pink on Hawthorne Blvd.

I loved the result and I can't tell you how nice it was to have one room that was fairly finished, particularly during the time when I was brushing my teeth in the kitchen sink because I didn't have one in the bathroom. And the kitchen? It had no proper floor because I'd ripped the tile out one day when water leaked all over it and into the subfloor. And the marmoleum I'd ordered was on backorder with no ETA. And half my life was still in moving boxes in the dining room. Walking through that furnished living room, with its funny TV touches (there's wood piled in the fireplace even though I have yet to get a chimney inspector out to tell me if the thing is safe to use), well, that was like HEAVEN.

I had a small housewarming party the night of the reveal where we ate pizza and drank warm beer (did I mention the house didn't come with appliances?). Then a funny thing happened: everyone felt the need to point out things that needed fixing in the house. I have no idea if this happens to all homeowners, or just people who buy fixers. Or maybe it just happens to women? I already knew I had a lot of work (did I mention part of my backyard fence blew down the day I signed for the house? Oh universe, you SLAY me!) so hearing that my garbage disposal was broken and that my water heater didn't seem to work had me in deep despair by the end of the evening. I went home that night, curled up with my roommate's dog on the hallway floor, and cried my eyes out. What had I done? How on earth was I going to handle the responsibility of this house? I'm in a much better place now but I know that I will probably do this again some time in the future when my sewer line breaks or my basement floods or the rest of my fence falls over.

I took the following week off of work and worked all day, every day, on my house. I'll post some details in a bit from that week.

My first place!

I did it. I bought a house. It was a foreclosure and it's most definitely a fixer. I love it.

There are some pretty obvious problems from the get-go: I have half a garage door (the previous owner's daughter drove through it) and no gutters on the house. I have a new roof . . . but no roof vents.


I have ELEVEN arbor vitae in front of the house, which makes my house look like a crumbling, dilapidated fortress, a house where the ladies of Grey Gardens would be comfortable.

ELEVEN, you guys. Who plants that many in the front of their house? Inside the house I have some electrical issues (bad splices in the attic, my electrical box has no cover, I seem to have bare wires poking out in places), and a lot of deferred maintenance issues to address. Basically, there are a lot of little things that the former owner should have been doing, but he got distracted by the game on TV . . . or something . . . and it never happened.

The house was empty for three or four years, depending on which neighbor you talk to. The basement smells like mildew and the sink in the bathroom doesn't work. Every room has been painted two different colors, and none of those colors seem to reach the corners. The wood floors are pretty thrashed. The deck off the master bedroom is rotting. In every single room they covered the windows with some sort of window film, which left a blackish residue once it was removed.

It's so beautiful.



The wraparound windows. The arches! The coved ceilings. It still has the original art deco tile in the bathroom.


It needs a lot of work but I'm excited to do it. I'll be documenting my projects here, as I'll be doing most of it myself. I have some money, thanks to the government first-time homebuyer credit, some very gracious friends, and an electric drill my brother gave me. I also found a hammer in one of the kitchen drawers. So there's that, too.